This could be the biggest backtrack in gaming history: Microsoft will reverse course on their DRM policies for Xbox One, dropping their Internet requirements and all restrictions on used games, according to the websites WhatHiFi and GiantBomb.

According to both reports, the announcement will be made today.

Citing multiple sources, GiantBomb says Microsoft has decided to remove a laundry list of Xbox One restrictions that customers considered negative:

No more always online requirement
The console no longer has to check in every 24 hours
All game discs will work on Xbox One as they do on Xbox 360
Authentication is no longer necessary
An Internet connection is only required when initially setting up the console
All downloaded games will function the same when online or offline
No additional restrictions on trading games or loaning discs
Region locks have been dropped

Since they revealed the Xbox One in May, Microsoft has faced non-stop criticism for announced policies that could drastically change the way we play games in the future. The Xbox One, they said, would require players to connect to the Internet once every 24 hours in order to keep the box playing games. You would have to activate each game by registering it on the web before playing. The console would also restrict the way that game discs are traded, borrowed, and shared, limiting the number of people who could own and play each game, and restricting trade-ins on a publisher-by-publisher basis.

Microsoft has justified these policies by saying that these moves are consistent with a shift to digital seen on Steam, iTunes and other digital platforms.

By reversing on those policies, Microsoft calls a lot of things into question: what will become of the Xbox One's family sharing plan? Will publishers find other ways to block used games? And what of all the rhetoric of how "the bits"—the data on each game disc, rather than the discs themselves—are the future?

We've reached out to Microsoft for comment but have not heard back yet.

Hence the 24 hour checkin. If you agree to the 24 hour checkin you can have family sharing for digital copies only.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Shit, if you agree to the 24 hour check-in, you should be able to have access to everything they had originally planned, not just the family share, I agree 110%.

__________________
ZootedGranny:

"That's the reason my FFL team name is TrentGreenLeadBlock. When you see this mother****er coming around the corner on a block, put your children to bed and batten down the hatch on your girl's snatch, because the same power that destroys defenders can scar the minds of the youth and simultaneously impregnate any woman within sight, live or on television."

After seeing "a lot of confusion online," a Respawn Entertainment engineer has explained how multiplayer shooter Titanfall will make use of Microsoft's cloud technology across the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC versions of the game.

Many current multiplayer games use peer-to-peer matchmaking, explains Joe Shiring on Respawn Entertainment's website. The downsides to this method are lag, host advantage, host disconnections, bandwidth, and potential opportunities for cheating.

Shiring said many developers use player-hosted servers to save money. "Running hundreds of thousands of servers can be extremely expensive," he said. "EXTREMELY expensive. Like 'oh my god we can't afford that' expensive. So your player experience gets compromised to save (large amounts of) money."

The alternative is dedicated servers, which cost a lot more money for developers as it requires a separate computer to host the multiplayer game. "I personally talked to both Microsoft and Sony and explained that we need to find a way to have potentially hundreds-of-thousands of dedicated servers at a price point that you can't get right now," said Shiring. "Microsoft realized that player-hosted servers are actually holding back online gaming and that this is something that they could help solve, and ran full-speed with this idea."

Shiring also said how Microsoft's cloud service Azure--which it's using to power its Xbox Live cloud--will power more than just dedicated servers. "The Xbox group came back to us with a way for us to run all of these Titanfall dedicated servers and that lets us push games with more server CPU and higher bandwidth, which lets us have a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that!"

The term "cloud" can be confusing in itself, Shiring added. "Cloud doesn't seem to actually mean anything anymore, or it has so many meanings that it's useless as a marketing word."

"Let me explain this simply: when companies talk about their cloud, all they are saying is that they have a huge amount of servers ready to run whatever you need them to run. That's all."

The costs associated with accessing Microsoft's cloud technology is reasonable, too, according to Shiring. "Most importantly to us, Microsoft priced it so that it's far more affordable than other hosting options--their goal here is to get more awesome games, not to nickel-and-dime developers."

"So because of this, dedicated servers are much more of a realistic option for developers who don't want to make compromises on their player experience, and it opens up a lot more things that we can do in an online game."

"Over time, I expect that we'll be using these servers to do a lot more than just dedicated servers. This is something that's going to let us drive all sorts of new ideas in online games for years to come," concluded Shiring.

Titanfall will launch for the Xbox One, Xbox 360, and PC in 2014.

__________________
ZootedGranny:

"That's the reason my FFL team name is TrentGreenLeadBlock. When you see this mother****er coming around the corner on a block, put your children to bed and batten down the hatch on your girl's snatch, because the same power that destroys defenders can scar the minds of the youth and simultaneously impregnate any woman within sight, live or on television."